Radioactive iodine found by Dartmouth researchers in the local New Hampshire environment is a direct consequence of a nuclear reactor's explosion and meltdown half a world away, says Joshua Landis, a research associate in the Department of Earth Science. The failure of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility, following the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami, was the largest nuclear disaster since 1986 at Chernobyl. "We live on a really small planet and this demonstrates that what happens in Japan has the potential to affect us."
Landis and a team drawn from Dartmouth's Department of Earth Science and Department of Geography recently published a paper in theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences addressing such concerns.
"Though regrettable, the Japanese catastrophe did provide a unique opportunity to examine the transport and accumulation of radioactive iodine in the environment," Landis says. "We took up this study mostly as concerned scientists in our own right, wondering how much of this contaminant is really coming down, and where the iodine is moving in the landscape."